“I—Zebulon Kingsley—a financier, a man supposed to be in his right mind,” he squealed, beating his breast as he struggled to his feet, “I bought a gold brick!”
XV—A TIP FROM MR. DAWLIN
WHILE I blinked at Zebulon Kingsley through the gloom I remembered what “Cricket” Welch had once said to me, in one of those sessions where I lapped up information as greedily as a kitten laps milk. He had a flow of language, “Cricket” had, and I wish I could remember his words more accurately. But it was something like this:
“Why should any crook bring on brain-fag by thinking up new ones when the old ones, with gears smoothed by twenty-five centuries of steady operation, work so much better? As long ago as old Solomon was figuring on Temple estimates with the architects, and had quite a reputation in the country round about, a little chap dropped into a village outside of Babylon and gave out that he was The Old Boy’s son by Wife 411, and was interested in King Solomon’s mines along with his dad. Then he unloaded a gold brick on to a village sucker, first making the sucker believe that the latter was a buttonhole relation of the Solomon family.”
I was running that speech over in my mind while I looked at the judge, a little uncertain what to say to him under the circumstances.
“And yet, the fraud did not seem to be barefaced while they were at work on me,” lamented the old gentleman. “One of them, the one who came to town first, was the son of one of my old schoolmates who went West when he was young and has been settled there ever since. Young Blake was East on business and dropped into Levant to look the old town over; his father told him to make himself known to me, so that he could carry back news of the folks his father used to know here.”
And in my book of notes I had set down the detail of just such a scheme as that!
“They always have a skirmisher ahead of the main push,” I blurted. “He finds out about somebody who settled West—and then along comes the son.”